They drag prayer lower than I ever could

Damon Fowler’s school has decided that ‘thou shalt not lie’ doesn’t apply if you’re lying for Jesus. PZ and Jen McCreight hit the nail on the head with this one.

There are times in life when you’ve lost a loved one or experienced some other piece of misery when the phrase “I’ll pray for you” is an extension of sympathy. Sure, it’s cosmically meaningless, but at least it conveys a unifying wish of wellness. In my experience, this is the rarest use of the phrase.

Then there are times when “I’ll pray for you” is spat with a sneering curl of the lip and no sincerity whatsoever. Usually, this happens during–and typically at the end of– a debate, when you have just spent 45 minutes showing some dim bulb that he has neither evidence, facts, logic, nor reason with which to support his side of the issue, and like a boxer on the ropes with his last gasp he takes a wild roundhouse swing, “I’ll pray for you!” It is always done with condescending arrogance designed to make you feel inferior that says, “Not only am I right and you are wrong, but I am a better person than you” or “You obviously can’t take care of (fill in the blank) yourself, and god won’t help you on his own, so I’ll ask since he listens to me more.” It is a Christian’s passive-aggressive way (or a passive-aggressive Christian’s way) of putting you down. It can mean, “You’re such a wretched specimen of humanity that you need divine intervention in order to avoid your just punishment of eternal torment by fire.” This is usually how I encounter the expression, and I usually just smile at the weakness of it and silently thank the believer for dragging their own beliefs through the mud.

And then there are times when a group of believers decide that prayer as a means of individual spite is too noble. Those are the times when prayer is used expressly for large scale divisiveness. That is how Bastrop High School and one pious student have elected to use it.

The terrible irony here is that even though they apparently think the best application of their beliefs is as a snide put down used to ostracize non-Christians, they will simultaneously demand that we respect their beliefs as beautiful and unifying. Sadly, we live in a world where irony and foul play are not physically painful.

Listen to the lady introducing the students.

“I want you to please make sure you give these young people the respect they have earned. This is their graduation and a happy time for them and we don’t want anything to distract from that.”

What a fucking liar. It’s just fine when they parade a huge distraction out on stage, but when a student asks his school to obey the law all of a sudden it’s that student, not the school, distracting from graduation. Hypocrites.

Unfortunately, the faculty’s loose concept of respect appears to have trickled down to their charges. Listen to the student in the video.

“I respect those who do not share the same beliefs as I do.”

They say the truth always comes after ‘but’. And on that stage, ‘but’ was followed by a smug bit of sectarian preening cheered on by a herd of supportive believers. If this student is not flat out lying like her role models at the school, then she has a very odd definition of the word ‘respect’.

So now that I’ve vented my personal take on these assholes, here’s my professional take. What likely happened is that the school consulted their legal adviser who told them, rightly, that the school cannot endorse a prayer. So instead they asked a student to do it, the valedictorian in this case, who was already scheduled to speak. This way the school can say “hey, it wasn’t us – the student did this all on her own”. Though underhanded and bearing no expression of concern for anybody but the Christians, this little piece of fuckery may actually be legal since it’s technically not the school endorsing the prayer, but rather a student on the school’s time.

I will spend this morning consulting my army of legal advisers at work to see what can be done and will update as soon as I know anything. In the meantime, please continue to give Damon support. This road will not be easy, and he’s doing it in the face of familial exile and a huge smear-campaign from followers of a religion that claims to make people more moral. Show him there’s a welcoming community of like-minded people willing to take him in.

When not defending the planet from inevitable apocalypse at the rotting hands of the undead, JT is a writer and public speaker about atheism, gay rights, and more. He spent two and a half years with the Secular Student Alliance as their first high school organizer. During that time he built the SSA’s high school program and oversaw the development of groups nationwide. JT is also the co-founder of the popular Skepticon conference and served as the events lead organizer during its first three years.

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